Anxiety

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by Daniel Freeman




  Anxiety: A Very Short Introduction

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  CONSCIENCE Paul Strohm

  CONSCIOUSNESS Susan Blackmore

  CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass

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  CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy

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  DRUIDS Barry Cunliffe

  EARLY MUSIC Thomas Forrest Kelly

  THE EARTH Martin Redfern

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  EGYPTIAN MYTH Geraldine Pinch

  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford

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  ENGLISH LITERATURE Jonathan Bate

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  EPIDEMIOLOGY Rodolfo Saracci

  ETHICS Simon Blackburn

  THE EUROPEAN UNION John Pinder and Simon Usherwood

  EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth

  EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn

  FASCISM Kevin Passmore

  FASHION Rebecca Arnold

  FEMINISM Margaret Walters

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  FREUD Anthony Storr

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  GALILEO Stillman Drake

  GAME THEORY Ken Binmore

  GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh

  GENIUS Andrew Robinson

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  GEOPOLITICS Klaus Dodds

  GERMAN LITERATURE Nicholas Boyle

  GERMAN PHILOSOPHY Andrew Bowie

  GLOBAL CATASTROPHES Bill McGuire

  GLOBAL ECONOMIC HISTORY Robert C. Allen

  GLOBAL WARMING Mark Maslin

  GLOBALIZATION Manfred Steger

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL Eric Rauchway

  HABERMAS James Gordon Finlayson

  HEGEL Peter Singer

  HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood

  HERODOTUS Jennifer T. Roberts

  HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson

  HINDUISM Kim Knott

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AMIC HISTORY Adam Silverstein

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  NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green

  NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland

  NOTHING Frank Close

  NUCLEAR POWER Maxwell Irvine

  NUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M. Siracusa

  NUMBERS Peter M. Higgins

  OBJECTIVITY Stephen Gaukroger

  THE OLD TESTAMENT Michael D. Coogan

  ORGANIZATIONS Mary Jo Hatch

  PAGANISM Owen Davies

  PARTICLE PHYSICS Frank Close

  PAUL E. P. Sanders

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  THE PERIODIC TABLE Eric R. Scerri

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  QUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne

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  REALITY Jan Westerhoff

  THE REFORMATION Peter Marshall

  RELATIVITY Russell Stannard

  RELIGION IN AMERICA Timothy Beal

  THE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton

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  RIVERS Nick Middleton

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  RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly

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  SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone

  SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway

  SCIENCE AND RELIGION Thomas Dixon

  SCIENCE FICTION David Seed

  THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Lawrence M. Principe

  SCOTLAND Rab Houston

  SEXUALITY Véronique Mottier

  SHAKESPEARE Germaine Greer

  SIKHISM Eleanor Nesbitt

  SLEEP Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster

  SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just

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  STEM CELLS Jonathan Slack

  STUART BRITAIN John Morrill

  SUPERCONDUCTIVITY Stephen Blundell

  TERRORISM Charles Townshend

  THEOLOGY David F. Ford

  THOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr

  TOCQUEVILLE Harvey C. Mansfield

  TRAGEDY Adrian Poole

  THE TUDORS John Guy

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan

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  UTOPIANISM Lyman Tower Sargent

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  VIRUSES Dorothy H. Crawford

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  Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman

  ANXIETY

  A Very Short Introduction

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

  United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

  It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  ©Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman 2012

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  First Edition published in 2012

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights
organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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  ISBN 978-0-19-956715-7

  Printed in Great Britain

  on acid-free paper by

  Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire

  Contents

  Preface

  List of illustrations

  1 What is anxiety?

  2 Theories of anxiety

  3 Nature or nurture?

  4 Michael Palin and Graham Taylor: Everyday anxiety and how to cope with it

  5 Phobias

  6 Social phobia

  7 Panic disorder

  8 Generalized anxiety disorder

  9 Obsessive-compulsive disorder

  10 Post-traumatic stress disorder

  11 Treatment

  Appendix: Self-assessment questionnaires and further information

  Sources

  Further reading

  Index

  Preface

  Anxiety is one of the fundamental emotions, as central a part of what it means to be human as happiness, sadness, or anger. If you were asked to recall the last time you felt anxious, doubtless you wouldn’t have to look back very far.

  In its more severe forms, anxiety is also one of the most common types of psychological disorder, with millions of people around the world affected at any one time.

  There’s no doubting the importance of anxiety, then. But though we all experience this emotion, perhaps on a regular basis, for many of us it can seem a pretty mysterious experience. Rather like the biblical description of the wind, we recognize anxiety when it arrives but know neither where it’s come from nor where it’s going.

  So we begin this Very Short Introduction by defining the meaning of anxiety. We attempt to pin down what anxiety is; what it feels like; and what its purpose might be. Though everyone feels anxious from time to time, how often we experience anxiety and how severely it affects us varies from person to person. To understand why this is, in Chapter 2 we focus on the four main theoretical perspectives on anxiety: the psychoanalytic, behavioural, cognitive, and neurobiological. We build on this discussion in Chapter 3 by considering how our genes and life experiences influence our susceptibility to anxiety.

 

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